“I Will Survive”

1977

“I Will Survive” probably would’ve become a gay anthem even without the specter of AIDS. It has an undeniable flair for the dramatic: After moving through that filigreed piano intro, you can imagine a lone spotlight shining on Gloria Gaynor as she drags the man dumb enough to break her heart and crawl back for more. It was released as disco’s wave was beginning to break, topping the Billboard charts a few months before the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park. Had the story ended there, it’d represent the last, best gasp of a culture beaten into temporary irrelevance by thinly-veiled racism and homophobia. (The out lesbian diva Alicia Bridges’ “I Love the Nightlife” stands out as another hit from this time.)

A few years later, when a generation of queer people was ravaged by a disease dismissed as “the gay plague,” “I Will Survive” made for the perfect rallying cry. It burns with righteous indignation and celebrates resilience, qualities well-suited to a community that scrapped for recognition and banded together even as it was condemned and ignored as a matter of policy. (You can imagine the marginalized asking the same rhetorical questions Gaynor poses in the pre-chorus: “Did you think I’d crumble? Did you think I’d lay down and die?”) Even after decades of progress, many LGBTQ+ people are still made to grapple with daily assaults on their personhood. “I Will Survive” remains there for them, ready to galvanize in moments when asserting your basic humanity feels like an act of defiance. –Jamieson Cox

“You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”

1978

It’s still stunning, the sheer radicalness of Sylvester: an out-and-loud, gospel-singing, gender-nonconforming queen among queens who not only revolutionized disco in the late ’70s, but affirmed her identity so intensely that few people dared question it. This track from her second album, Step II, was originally written as a gospel song for the piano; it was then remixed and produced into perfection by Patrick Cowley, another disco pioneer lost to AIDS. His version married Sylvester’s take-you-to-church vocals with the synthesizer, then still considered a revolutionary instrument. Packed skyward with handclaps, tambourine shakes, and lazer synths, not only is “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” a stone-cold classic of the disco era, it’s a revelation of queer desire. When Sylvester sings, “I feel real when you want me” to her dancefloor paramour, it’s not just a simple admission of want. The song is about singing the praises of someone—whoever, whatever they happen to be—who make us feel good, seen, validated, and alive. –T. Cole Rachel

“Don’t Stop Me Now”

1978

This shamelessly jaunty, piano-pumping karaoke killer wasn’t a big hit at first, by Queen standards. It hails from Queen’s also moderately popular Jazz, which inspired Rolling Stone’s most suspiciously scathing review ever. (Sample dis: “Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band.”) The song’s wan initial reception may have had something to do with the genders of its love interests, which flip from male to female and back again to assert that frontman Freddie Mercury was bisexual—and it was released just days before the gay visionary Harvey Milk was assassinated.

But like Elton John’s originally neglected “Tiny Dancer,” “Don’t Stop Me Now” is today considered quintessential. It’s the giddy, fun-loving flipside to the forcefulness of “We Are the Champions,” and though it similarly acknowledges outside resistance, it does so with a flick of the wrist from a shy guy still hiding behind the sybarite self he strutted onstage so legendarily. In the early ’80s, Mercury indulged that pleasure-seeker, and he prematurely and cruelly met his mortality. But this song, with its poignant and high-Fahrenheit fantasy of enjoyment without end, will live forever. –Barry Walters

“Go West”

1979

Most music fans would be forgiven for dismissing the Village People as a disco novelty act—and they wouldn’t be completely wrong. After all, their relentlessly gaudy “YMCA” remains inescapable to this day, providing manufactured glee at everything from bar mitzvahs to baseball games. In hindsight, however, it’s amazing that such an openly, flamboyantly gay act was able to reach popularity at all in the late ’70s, let alone earn household-name status within months of their formation.

“Go West,” the title track of the Village People’s fourth studio album, stands alone among the band’s most famous songs: It’s a passionate, lustful ode to queer community and spirit. Released a few years after the staunch conservative Anita Bryant launched her despicable “Save Our Children” campaign, which became the blueprint for the next 30 years of anti-LGBTQ+ politics, “Go West” imagined a utopia free of homophobia and discrimination. The rousing choral chants of “Together!”—blasting over joyous horns and hi-hats—don’t just describe a man and his lover, but all queer folk yearning to find their tribe and flourish in the sun. –Cameron Cook

“Is It All Over My Face (Female Vocal)”

1980

The gay, avant-garde musical prodigy Arthur Russell, working with DJ Steve D’Acquisto, hustled up money in 1979 from the disco label West End Records for an experimental studio project. Hoping to capture the propulsive energy of their favorite New York hotspot, the Loft, Russell and D’Acquisto invited musicians and singers into the studio and subjected them to Buddhist-influenced improv and DIY recording practices. Thus, Loose Joints were born.

DJ genius Larry Levan kidnapped the master tapes, taking it upon himself to remix the record with his connoisseur nightclub crowd at the Paradise Garage in mind. Levan’s reworking of the track is a masterpiece of throbbing, risqué, suspenseful funk—an off-kilter confluence of electric keys, propulsive bass, sinewy drumming by Philadelphia’s John Ingram, and a blasé, haughty Melvina Woods vocal (“Is it all over my face?/You got me love dancing”). No song better captures the vibey, druggy, slightly dissociated erotics of downtown New York in its post-disco thrall. To this day, Russell, D’Acquisto and Levan’s mutant baby remains a staple of black and Latino gay ballroom scenes. In fact, a limber dancer with loose joints is probably fiercely voguing to “Is It All Over My Face” as you read this. –Jason King

“Private Idaho”

1980

Outrageous, kitschy, definitively Southern, and unmistakably queer, the B-52’s in their ’80s prime wove surreal imagery into irresistible technicolor new wave dance jams. While “Private Idaho,” their second hit, inspired Gus Van Sant to name a film that’s now become a part of queer cinematic canon (My Own Private Idaho), the song itself shares little thematically with that drama. Instead, it’s a classic B-52’s party song with expectedly bizarre and dark edges, Fred Schneider’s yelped lyrics conjuring a deep state of paranoia and surveillance (“private eye-daho,” get it?) as they clash with Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson’s lush harmonies. Guitarist Ricky Wilson—an integral part of the band’s early success, and Cindy’s brother—particularly shines here with his ferocious playing; tragically, he would pass away from AIDS a few short years later, spurring the band to activism in honor of his memory. What better way, too, to celebrate life than to soundtrack a club floor where every weirdo can feel safe enough to dance this mess around? –Jes Skolnik

“I love how soft her voice is, and the passion that went into the song. I feel like when I listen to it, it takes me to a place where all I can see is beautiful flowers. It’s her voice! Her voice does it for me! And the message of her being so blunt about how she loves her women is so powerful and strongly said. It’s an anthem.”

CupcakKe on Kehlani’s “Honey”

Photo by Johnny Nunez/WireImage

Motown

Diana Ross

“I’m Coming Out”

1980

Disco appealed to pretty much everybody except the straight white dudes who ran the music industry; they got tired of gay/black/Latino club DJs calling the shots, just as disco’s reigning band Chic morphed into an equally fierce songwriting, production, and instrumental team. One night, their leader Nile Rodgers spotted three Diana Ross–impersonating drag queens at GG’s Barnum Room, a Manhattan disco where transgender acrobats on trapezes flew over the dance floor. He had the ingenious idea to have Miss Ross herself sing a roof-raising LGBTQ+ anthem as a thank-you to all those queens for supporting her (and Chic, too).

This meant Rodgers—a revolutionary in designer duds—was never upfront about the fact that “I’m Coming Out” was obviously about sexuality. Indeed, it’s also about being your truest self and throwing aside shame’s shackles. Ross rose to the occasion, turning in a triumphant performance as exacting as Chic’s sashaying accompaniment. But Motown hated the album, demanded the tapes, remixed them to downplay Chic’s instrumentation, and released diana in 1980 without so much as a single for the first month. Rodgers and collaborator Bernard Edwards nearly disowned what they’d originally considered their crowning achievement. Then “Upside Down” went No. 1, “I’m Coming Out” hit No. 5, and diana—ultimately her biggest solo album ever—sold nine million internationally. Disco wasn’t dead yet; queers still had clout. –Barry Walters

“Tainted Love”

1981

When Ed Cobb wrote “Tainted Love” in 1964, he never could have imagined its grim repurposing two decades later. In the ’80s, the song came to represent the fear and dread that gripped the gay community at the very start of the AIDS crisis. The soul singer Gloria Jones first recorded a manic version of the song in 1965, and in the early ’70s, it became a favorite of the U.K.’s Northern Soul scene. Then Soft Cell’s Marc Almond changed the piece radically in 1981 by taking a much slowed-down and sleazed-up approach, and it became an unlikely smash in the U.S.

At that time, AIDS had not yet been given that name, though gay men knew all too well of a mysterious new “cancer” ravaging the community. The key lines in the song, “Once I ran to you/Now I’ll run from you,” were the first to capture the new terror surrounding sex and connection. At the same time, Soft Cell’s shadowy version embraced the darkness, capturing the complex amalgam of pitched attraction and deep angst that marked earlier eras of gay life. In 1985, when AIDS was overwhelming the community, “Tainted Love” appeared once again, this time via the British group Coil. Their video for the song cast one of their own members as a man dying of the disease, finally putting the plague into full, savage focus. –Jim Farber

“Pull Up to the Bumper”

1981

The subject matter of “Pull Up to the Bumper” has been interpreted widely as anal sex, oral sex, and, well, simply parking a car. But therein lies the sly, transgressive power of Grace Jones: Between her cutting sense of humor and relish of outré spectacle, the Jamaican pop iconoclast has never been hemmed in by flimsy, pearl-clutching moral codes, even if those same codes most likely played a role in the song’s mainstream radio swift ban for its “lewd content.” (It was released the year of Reagan’s inauguration, after all.)

Jones’ genre-hopping artistry earned her a diehard LGBTQ+ fan base from day one, largely because of her very uncommon divadom. By gleefully toying with masculine and feminine conventions, she offered her queer audience a constantly evolving performance in which they could recognize their own sexual fluidity. “Bumper” succinctly captures Jones’ protean mix of playfulness and aggression, simultaneously tongue-in-cheek and dead serious. It’s a masterstroke of double entendre that, with its sinuous reggae-disco backdrop and Jones’ snarled vehicular puns, really only demands one thing from you: that you move. –Eric Torres

“Homosapien”

1981

Pete Shelley shared private lusts to which the shame clung like incense on priestly robes. Embracing synthesizers just when everyone else in England did, the former Buzzcocks singer-guitarist coaxed out of them what everyone in England wasn’t: writing without a hint of code-switching about homo superiors in his interiors. The clinking-clanking “Homosapien” made an excellent solo debut for a songwriter whose previous works relied on the all-purpose second person pronoun yet whose prissy, epicene vocals, on desperation moves like “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’tve” and “You Say You Don’t Love Me,” gave the game away. This is a vignette by an orgasm addict, out and loving it, of understanding that life is as much performed as it is lived, of cruising for losers because it’s fun. Not as fun: the BBC banning it for its “explicit reference to gay sex.” Their loss. –Alfred Soto